Lepin 02034 Not Lego Cargo Port Terminal Set Review - Part Two

Welcome back to my Its-Not-Lego blog!   In this second part of the Lepin 02034 Cargo Port Terminal set review, we will look at the cargo truck, the cargo pier and the cargo port crane.  If you missed the first part of this post, you can find it here.

Cargo Truck

The truck itself isn't ground breaking, it's pretty much a standard vehicle you can find in most of the Lego and clone sets.

These are some pics I took during it's quick construction.  I think there's too many colours going on. They should have made the truck just blue, just red or just yellow, but not all three.

 The cargo truck cab has a steering wheel but no seats or doors.  It does get small side mirrors though.

Here's the assembled truck and driver.

 The instruction manual tells you to make the cargo truck yellow container look like this with the indents facing outward.

 But, I prefer the container on the truck to look more like this.  Now let's move on to the next component, the cargo pier.

 The Cargo Pier

The cargo pier is an easy build.  The frame  above is basically covered with a large flat grey piece that makes up the pier.

Here's the entrance gates and ramp to the pier.

Yup, you can close the gates at the end of the working day.  There's a small traffic light that tells you whether you can proceed.

There's a small guard station that you snap into the pier.

Accessories for the guard station include a tool rack with broom and shovel, a garbage can and some tank.  There's a control screen inside the station presumably to monitor the activities at the port.

Here's the remainder of assembled pier that is comprised of the two large road pieces.  The Lepin pieces are a bit soft and there's yucky plastic extrusion dimples on each piece.

Check it out!  This cargo pier is really long.  It pretty much spans the length of my little building setup.

You get this fisherman minifig with the cargo set.  It took me awhile to thread his fishing pole and wind the string around his reel.

I made a little chair for him to sit at the end of the pier, out of the way while we build and install the next component, which is the gantry and crane.

The Gantry and Crane

Another straight forward build, the gantry and turntable.  I was thinking how cool it would be if it had wheels on the bottom that could roll along a track on the pier.

For now, it continues to be a stationary gantry.  Easily mounted onto the pier.

At this point, I was focused on building the control cabin and the crane attachment so I didn't stop to take pictures during it's construction.   Needless to say, I was running into some problems with the finicky parts that wouldn't stay together.   Specifically, the two 1x4 bricks pictured above.  Once you attach the crane pieces, those two pieces would pop off due to the weight of the crane and lack of clutch power.

Ok, so I switched out the 1x4s and tried this solution instead.  At this point, the crane did not topple over.  Yay!

The crane operator was pretty happy about that until ....

....  I tried lifting one of the containers with the crane and this is what happened.  The crane still popped off the control cabin.   Urrrgh.

Back to the drawing board, I decided to use some Sluban bricks (you can tell, because their shade of red is darker).  Their clutch is better for some reason.

Here's a rear view shot of the crane where I used the Sluban bricks.  In case you are wondering about the two knobs, the lower one controls the cable length, which you can reel out or reel in.  The upper knob controls how high or low you want to adjust the crane arm.

Here's the crane arm in it's highest position.

And here it is in the lowest position.

Alright, this is much better.  The crane successfully lifts up the container without falling off.

Final Thoughts

The Lepin Cargo Port set definitely has a lot of play value.  I can see hours of fun driving the cargo truck onto the pier and off-loading the huge cargo ship with the giant crane.  I wish I had a big table so that I could integrate the cargo port with all the modular buildings into one large layout.

To review, the Lepin brick quality was acceptable except for the scuffed ship hull.  All the clear pieces such as windshields and windows were individually wrapped to prevent scratches.  I had some problems with the brick clutch on the crane portion of the set which I subsequently resolved.   Minifig quality was excellent and I didn't see any flaws or errors in the bootleg versions.

I didn't encounter any missing or broken parts in this set (other than the hull that probably got cracked during shipping).  Lepin included an extra bag of small spare parts, which I think they've started to do on all of the newer sets.

From a design perspective,  there should have been more than the three cargo containers in the set.  I took the cargo containers from my Ausini freight train set and added them to this set.  I also found the bridge structure (I think it's called a castle?) to be a bit small, and if you take a closer look at the top picture, you will notice that I completely rebuilt the bridge and castle of the cargo ship.  I'll make a bonus post in the near future to take a closer look at the changes I made to the cargo ship.

So just for fun, I decided to scour ebay to see what a new original Lego 7994 Cargo Harbour set costs today.  I found about 8 sets ranging in price from mid $400s up to almost $900 USD.

If I had to rate the Lepin Cargo Port set, I would give it 4.5 out of 5, knocking off half a point for the poor brick clutch in the crane.   Well, that's my review, hope you enjoyed the pics.  As always, thanks for visiting Its Not Lego and See you next time!

Lepin 02034 Not Lego Cargo Port Terminal Set Review - Part One

Hi There! It's time to do another  review of a bootleg brick set.  Today we are going to look at the Lepin Cargo Port building set 02034 which is a copy of the Lego City Harbour set 7994.  The Lego set came out in 2007 and this Lepin version was released in 2017, ten years later.

Because the hull is so large, the package arrived looking like this.

Which kind of looks like that freaky asteroid that has found it's way into our solar system.

This is my third set that I bought from Jeremy on Reddit. I paid about $35 USD for it, I think.  He said he was having a bit of trouble trying to ship it, now I know why.  This set was really hard to wrap because of the ship hull.

Here's the entire set unwrapped from it's cocoon.  The Lepin Cargo port set is supposed to have 695 pieces.

Quick look at the instruction manual booklet front cover.

And here's the back cover of the manual.  Lepin changed the Lego City to Cities on the brochure, but you'll notice that the image of the cargo ship is lifted directly from the Lego manual because it says City Line on it.  It's evident on both front and back of the manual.

They did however change the City Lines to Cities Lines on the sticker sheet, shown above.  Cities Lines just sounds wrong.

What drew me to this set was of course the giant ship hull.  As you can see it's almost as long as all my little modular sets put together.  I found the plastic of the hull to be kind of a dull matte finish and quite scuffed.  Also the plastic seems kind of thin, but I'm not sure if the Lego version of the hull is thicker or not.

So, the ship hull I got had a huge gash in the bottom which is a bummer.  I was planning to try to float the ship when I had completed the set, but don't think thats going to happen now.

Here you can see the full size of the gash in the hull.  I wanted to lift the grey insert from the hull to patch it from inside but I think it's glued on.  I'll probably resort to covering the gash with tape to prevent it from getting any bigger.

Anyways, I looked through the other parts in the set, and the rest of it seemed to to survive the trip from china.

While inspecting the parts bags, I noticed that they printed a number of most of the bags to correspond to the section in the manual.  This parts bag is for step 4.

While this bag is for step 1.

I'm sure the Lepin instructions are a direct copy of Lego. Above you can see bags with a 1 on them are used to construct the container truck, bag 2 parts are used for the container ship, bag 3 parts for the shipping containers, bag 4 parts for the cargo dock and finally bag 5 parts for the port crane.

Time to start building!  There's a lot going on in this set, so this post will be dedicated to the cargo ship and containers.  In a following post, I'll look at the container truck, the cargo port and crane.

You get five mini figures with this set. The first three are the ship's captain, the engineer and a deck hand.

Here's all the bits and bobs being added to the deck and container hold of the ship.

Lepin gives you this really really long string to attach the anchor.  I cut it in half to use for the crane and fishing rod later.

If you don't cut it, you'll get this giant mess.  I wish they designed a crank to roll up the line for the anchor.

Anchors away!

There's a small storage area at the bow of the ship where the crew found a stow-away!

Ok, since there's no brig, we'll throw him into the engine room at the ship's aft.  Maybe he can work on the engines while he's down there with the tools provided.

On top of the engine compartment is the control cabin.

There's just enough room for the captain and maybe one other crew member on the bridge.  I find the headroom is quite lacking, something I'll probably fix later.

I should point out that all the transparent pieces on this set are individually wrapped to protect their finish.  Here's the windows for the cargo ship bridge, perfectly clear, no smudges or scratches.  Looks like Lepin actually listens to it's customers.  Shame it took so long though.

Just another look at the bridge and the controls before we put the roof on.

Here's the assembled roof with navigation and communication apparatus.

The cargo ship bridge with roof attached.  As you can see there's no doors to the control section.  Hope to fix that too one day.

And here's the rear of the cargo ship.  I'm definitely going to revamp this area to make it bigger.

Oh before I forget, here's some of the storage containers that go into the cargo ship.

Whatever these are supposed to be, I put them on a smaller pallet to make room for other storage containers.

Finally, this container holds a tiny speedboat.

Here's the completed cargo ship with a few extra containers.

In part two of this blog post, I'll review the container truck, the port and crane and the remainder of the minifigures.   As always, thanks for visiting Its Not Lego and See you next time!